Month: May 2017

I want to be able to automatically create the README.md for GitHub whenever I create a new Common Lisp project. I was impressed by the number of systems that exist for documenting a Common Lisp package. However, I couldn’t find anything that was simple and that created Markdown output, like the README.md that GitHub uses.

I was in a hurry, so after a few minutes of Googling, I decided to create my own function for documenting packages for GitHub. It worked. Sort of. It documents function only, not macros or other things. Here’s the function:

That function, when called like this: (document-package :dc-utilities “~/README.md”) produces Markdown that looks like this:

# DC-UTILITIES
## alist-values (ALIST &REST KEYS)
Returns the values associated with KEYS in ALIST. ALIST is an associative list.
## bytes-to-uint (BYTE-LIST)
Converts the list of bytes BYTE-LIST into an unsigned integer.
## change-per-second (FUNCTION-OR-SYMBOL &OPTIONAL (SECONDS 1))
Given the function FUNCTION-OR-SYMBOL, who's return value changes over time, or a variable who's value changes over time, with the change being unidirectional, this function computes the rate of change by calling the function, sleeping, then calling the function again, then computing the rate of change per second. You can optionally specify the number of seconds to wait between calls. If FUNCTION-OR-SYMBOL is a variable, then this function retrieves the value of the variable, sleeps, then retrieves the value of the variable again.
## create-directory (DIR &KEY WITH-PARENTS)
Works just like the mkdir shell command. DIR is the directory you want to create. Use WITH-PARENTS if you want the function to create parent directories as necessary.
## cull-named-params (NAMED-PARAMS CULL-KEYS)
Given a value for NAMED-PARAMS like this one
'(:one 1 :two 2 :three 3)
and a list of CULL-KEYS like this one
'(:one :two)
this function returns a list of named parameters that excludes the names (and their values) that match the names in CULL-KEYS. In the above example, the result is
'(:three 3)
## directory-exists (PATH)
Returns a boolean value indicating if the directory specified by PATH exists.
.
.
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Which looks like this on GitHub:

Is there a package out there already that can do this better? If so, please leave me a comment. If not, I need to find out how to get the documentation for a macro, for a method, for a special variable, for a class, and so on. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Other things I want this function to do:

Check the .asd file to see if there’s a license bit: :license "MIT License"If there is, the code should check to see if there’s a LICENSE file in the project. If there isn’t, the code should determine if the name of the license is known. If the code is able to get the text for the license, it should include it at the beginning of the documentation.

Optionally produce a table of contents.

Output other formats (aside from Markdown) as well, like Text or Emacs Org-Mode.

For now, the document-package function is just a function in the dc-utilities package. However, once I flesh the function out a little, I will probably move it to its own repo. If you get ahead of me with any of this, please send me a note. I could really use this functionality.